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Has Lego Sold Out?
Hugh Pickens writes "Matt Richtel and Jesse McKinley write in the NY Times that for generations of American children, Legos were the ultimate do-it-yourself plaything. Little plastic bricks, with scant instructions, just add imagination. But today's construction sets are often tied to billion-dollar franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and invite users to follow detailed directions, not construct their own creations from whole brick. It's less open-ended, some parents and researchers say, and more like paint-by-numbers. 'When I was a kid, you got a big box of bricks and that was it,' says Tracy Bagatelle-Black. 'What stinks about Lego sets now is that they're not imaginative at all.' Lego loyalists are quick to defend the company. Josh Wedin, the managing editor of the Brothers Brick, a Lego blog, called complaints that they are less creative 'simply ridiculous,' adding that Legos always included some instructions, though he says he misses the alternative designs that used to be on the back of the box. But Clifford Nass, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies how people relate to the physical world versus the virtual world, says some essential qualities were lost when Lego became more like other toys. 'The genius of Lego was, you had to do the work.' Learning about frustration, Nass says, 'is a hugely important thing.'" (And watch soon for a review of The Unofficial Lego Builder's Guide, a book intended to help Lego users escape the tyranny of block-by-number instructions.)
The first step is to completely ignore the manual, and this is what they're teaching children. This is a skill I wasn't able to master until I was in college, but today's kids will have it done by high school.
Doesn't the NYT have anything more important to publish than people bitching about legos? If you just want a bag of bricks, you can still get them. In fact, you can order them in bulk now, which wasn't offered when I was a kid.
Ah, I agree so much. I had my fair share of legos when I was a child and the building blocks were nice and generic. Nowadays, all the pieces are molded to shape whatever you're supposed to make much better, resulting in a nicer looking whatever-it-is-you-were-making, but taking it apart, I wonder if there's much of a point in trying to make something else out of it, even beside the alternatives listed on the back of the box.
I'm glad I kept most of my legos for when my son's old enough for them. Other than that it looks like I'm stuck remembering the old days fondly.
What happens in my house: my son gets a Lego set. He excitedly spends hours building them (or one hour, if it's a small one). then he plays with it a little. A few days later I find it in pieces and deconstructed all over the playroom. A few days later, something else comes out as he institutes his own creations and modifications.
It's not a matter of lacking the manual, as we have kept every manual for every set he ever received. He knows where those manuals are, too.
To me, it seems like Lego has stuck a good balance.
They have had detailed instructions that you could follow for almost as long as Lego has existed.
The problem with today Lego I that they made they completely out of proprietary big pieces that do not really fit together any other way.
You used to be able to buy some castle set, with step by step instructions, but it was made with the exact same pieces as every other set out there. So at the end of the day you could take it apart and build that castle into a space ship. Now Lego is basically just action figures and video games.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
you could still buy buckets of bricks, and the whole back wall was loose bricks for people that wanted to make their own bucket. I've been playing with Lego for thirty years. I always wanted to make what was on the box first, but eventually it became whatever the hell I wanted it to be. If someone wants to whine about children not being creative these days, I think Lego is the last reason they aren't creative!
That title must go to Meccano. With this you could build real things that worked and would not fall into bits at the first knock. With strips of metal held together with nuts and bolts you could create great things. I loved it.
But today's construction sets ...invite users to follow detailed directions, not construct their own creations from whole brick...
Absolutely sensible approach. Today's child is growing up in today's environment, and will become a designer tomorrow. Today, if you create a design for which some idiot possesses a design patent, the latter will sue you for billions of dollars. If you have a brick with rounded corners, is glossy or black in colour, even God cannot save you from litigious thugs.The child needs to learn this lesson very early, and learn to 'behave' and 'obey' and 'conform' rather than be creative.
So Lego has researched and come up with designs which are not encumbered by prior art or patents; and given detailed instructions for kids to follow. 10 years from now, a design company would have about a 100 lawyers for every 5 designers. These lawyers would tell the designers exactly what to design, what not to design, and how not to be too successful and gain the wrath of patent holding Big Businesses.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
They sold kits in the old days. They even sold kits with various themes and special (non-brick) parts.
All of this nostalgia and angst is misplaced. These people are running off on a tangent based on some idealized notion of the past rather than what actaully happened.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My construction toy was an Erector Set, now long gone. These days Erector Sets in the US are rebranded Meccano sets.
Anyway, the thing about the Erector Set was that it not only exercised your imagination, as does LEGO, but it also exercised your manual dexterity, which LEGO does not. When you have to use little nuts and bolts to put things together you get good at manipulating small parts, which is excellent for improving hand-eye coordination, improving delicacy of touch and learning patience.
If you make things too easy for kids how are they to learn?
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
Yeah I remember space theme lego back when the space shuttle was still new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Space
Plenty of themes back then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lego_themes
Not all legos are equal, they have sort of diverged into two types: the traditional brick type (and in that I include even the specialized pieces, as long as they fit together in the traditional stud/brick mechanism) and the Technic/Mindstorms type, which use pieces more like girders that fit together with special connectors. The brick type has moved more in the licensing/set model direction, and those I sort of agree that the creativity seems to be missing these days. But I have to admit I'm glad they came up with a decent lego millenium falcon, which was absolutely perfect for my son for Christmas a year ago.
On the other hand, the Technic/Mindstorms type still focuses a lot on creativity, with alternate directions for different models included, and lots of resources available for idea books and programming and such. If you look on the Lego education site, they seemed to almost have moved in the opposite/more creative direction, with resources for bodging together Mindstorms electronic components with a metal frame & RC servo-based robotics construction system (vertex? Tetrix? I forget what it was called) that another company makes.
Bottom line, if you want to emphasize creativity, go Technic early, then maybe branch off to mindstorms.
But can you even find "plain" kits any more? Seems like everything Lego I see is tied to a franchise of some sort. Even their "Friends" line is just buildings to put together.
I don't know about kits but you can definitely still buy Lego by the tub. There's a big Lego store at the Mall of America near where I live. They sell lots of licensed kits but there's lots there for freeform building. A few shelves are dedicated to tubs of plain bricks as well as some utility sets. Last Christmas we bought for my cousin a box of nothing but wheels and windscreens. They also have an entire wall they call "Pick-a-Brick" where you can fill up a cup with any assortment of bricks that you please. We're giving him a cup of those this year to provide him with some of the pieces that tend to get overlooked in the boxed sets.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
While my daughter was growing up, I had a random choice of what to step on if I went walking barefoot around the apartment in the middle of the night. I could step on a Lego, which is quite painful, or step on one of her goldfish that had jumped out of the tank. If you can see in the dark, pick the Lego. They won't die if you squash them and you don't have to explain to a little girl how you killed her pet fish. She is 40 years old now and still reminds me of this. You would think people would move on... Personally, I think the fish was depressed.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I think this story is a non-issue. I recently built the Millennium Falcon for work (yes, you read that right). It's an expensive set, but I was surprised that it only had two non-standard pieces (those comprising the cockpit). You could easily make something else with the pieces, if you so desired, or you could follow the instructions (which seemed barely more detailed than when I played with the Space Police sets) and make a cool, recognizable ship.
The only way I would think that Lego has sold out would be if a significant number of the pieces in any given set were non-standard and hard to incorporate into a custom design. Maybe that is a case and the set I built was an outlier, but it seems the option is still there to built whatever you want. In other words, Lego seems to be pretty much like it was when I was a kid, only with more brand recognition.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Picture a world where Lego did not sell all of their kits and just sold plain blocks. There is only so much you can do with plain blocks and sales would slowly go down. The recession hits and that is the final straw and Lego declares bankruptcy. Slashdot readers post stories about playing with Lego as a kid but complain how Lego really hasn't innovated with the times and those old corporate fossils we doomed to fail if they couldn't adapt.
Now we swap back to our world where Lego is constantly innovating to make kits that work with 95% of existing Lego pieces, tie ins with current pop culture, even Lego video games that are actually good and we need to complain how Lego isn't the same as it was 20 years ago. Go figure.
What a load of rubbish, Lego sets have included detailed instructions to make the specific thing on the box for decades! The main difference now is that sets are tied to specific films like Starwars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and so on rather than just generic themes like space, pirates, castles etc.
How is this pirate set from 1989 any worse than this Pirates of the Caribbean set from 2011?
It may be a movie tie-in but you've still got to build the thing yourself and you can take it apart and put it together again any way you like.
LEGO is expensive now, ...
Ok, I have to say this is simply flat out wrong. As a serious collector of Lego for over 30 years, I can authoritatively say that the price of Lego sets has held almost constant at ~ .10 per brick. Some of the newer licensed sets break that rule and go over that figure, but Lego has also introduced the Creator lines and similar sets with lots of basic bricks where the price falls well below the .10 a brick average.
But don't believe me. Go check out the prices on Brickset, a site that has a massive comprehensive catalog of old Lego sets and instructions. I looked up a few random set MSRPs from the early 80s to make sure I was remembering the prices right, and it looks like I was dead on. Holding steady at ~.10 per brick over 30 years is an amazing feat, doubly so if you adjust for inflation.
So, no Lego isn't expensive now. Its higher quality and less expensive than ever before. And Unlike 99% of the toys I had as a kid, it still works just fine.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!